![](\"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-images\/inline\/kiva.gif\")
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Call me selfish, but I’ve never been a big fan of charity. I don’t mean things like giving time or money to help find a cure for cancer or to help the EFF<\/a> to keep fighting for freedom. I’m happy to give a little to the EFF. I don’t like charity that’s just a hand out. I don’t care if its to corporations or individuals. I think its entirely counter productive and cultivates dangerous dependencies. <\/p>\n This is why I love the idea behind Kiva<\/a>. Kiva connects people in developing nations who need micro investments with people who want to give micro investments. Each investment seeker works with a local NGO, posts a profile of themselves, thier need, thier projected repayment period and the amount of investment (rarely anything over $1000). Kiva shows you a bar of how much of their needed investment has been contributed so far. <\/p>\n I dropped into my new Kiva account $50 that has just been sitting in my PayPal account for months doing nothing. You probably have a few dollars sitting you PayPal as well, also doing nothing. I then looked over a number of business opportunities in areas of the world I’m interested in helping, and loaned $25 each to two latin american women trying to grow their little shops. <\/p>\n Check out Maria Pilco<\/a> and Melvis Merchan<\/a>. I know my portfolio isn’t terribly diversified, but these businesses had the shortest repayment periods, and I want to see if this really works before investing more. Remember, this ain’t charity. <\/p>\n I don’t know if they actually get the money (Kiva promises the businesses get 100% of your loan), or if I’ll ever see it returned. But for $50, and the amount of good a model like this could do in the world, I feel that its more than worth the risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Call me selfish, but I’ve never been a big fan of charity. I don’t mean things like giving time or money to help find a cure for cancer or to help the EFF to keep fighting for freedom. I’m happy to give a little to the EFF. I don’t like charity that’s just a hand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-22","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}